I feel that most of these events are the result of misunderstanding. If we all just made an effort to understand and love each other, this wouldn't happen. I love you guys. [Mod edit for clarity. — JRG]

I feel that most of these events are the result of misunderstanding. If we all just made an effort to understand and love each other, this wouldn't happen. I love you guys. [Mod edit for clarity. — JRG]

What an awful thing to say, even for a troll._________________Deja Moo: the feeling that you've heard this bull before

I feel that most of these events are the result of misunderstanding. If we all just made an effort to understand and love each other, this wouldn't happen. I love you guys. [Mod edit for clarity. — JRG]

It really seems that the jokes concerning "regulation" seem to 747 right over the left's heads. Without trying to sound condescending, but did it ever cross your minds that regulation, by itself, doesn't seem to solve anything, especially with the government we have right now. I mean for Pete's sake, the people to make the tax code can't even follow their own rules, what makes you think that even half the laws passed in this country have any good intentions attached to them?

One failed attempt at a shoe bomb and we all take off our shoes at the airport.
Thirty-one school shooting since Columbine and no change in our regulation of guns.

10,228 people dead from DUIs in 2010 alone, and we still won't change our regulation of cars.

Or alcohol, which has far less redeeming social value than firearms.

indeed, it is bad. but its social value is high (see britain). but, again, its purpose is not to harm.

funny, at the other end of the spectrum, it's possible this year that japan will have less gun deaths than either this shooting or the aurora shooting ALL YEAR ACROSS THE COUNTRY.

Study up on the culture. I think it's mostly due to the social repercussions than anything else in that country that keep people in line. The shame brought upon a family by doing such a crime is usually enough to stop such crimes, even if they didn't have a ban on guns (at least that's the impression I got by studying the country, maybe someone can back me up on this).

However, the suicide rate... wow, not as bad as other countries, but still.

Study up on the culture. I think it's mostly due to the social repercussions than anything else in that country that keep people in line. The shame brought upon a family by doing such a crime is usually enough to stop such crimes, even if they didn't have a ban on guns (at least that's the impression I got by studying the country, maybe someone can back me up on this).

However, the suicide rate... wow, not as bad as other countries, but still.

Study up on the culture. I think it's mostly due to the social repercussions than anything else in that country that keep people in line. The shame brought upon a family by doing such a crime is usually enough to stop such crimes, even if they didn't have a ban on guns (at least that's the impression I got by studying the country, maybe someone can back me up on this).

However, the suicide rate... wow, not as bad as other countries, but still.

of course there are other factors. are you tackling those as well?

Of course not, I'm only saying that the laws regulating them are only a very tiny (if not unnecessary) part of it.

No? what would that do. There is a right to bear arms for starters and that is not going to change. Whether that right should cover assault rifles for home use is questionable.

Gun's isn't the issue here anyway, gun's were just the utility used. It could have been a knife, homemade bombs or a plastic spoon.

Other countries have liberal gunlaws: Israel & switzerland come to mind, maybe not as liberal as the USA, but still very liberal.

What is it within a society which breeds this kind of outburst? it cannot be denied that there is something in the American society which is procreating this.
is it guns? no other countries have them
video games? no other countries have them
TV programs/films? no other countries have them

Well, she did pose a danger, didn't she? She didn't prevent this nut from getting her gun.

She did, but what I'm saying is that if "You might let a nut get your gun and kill you with it" is a reason for denying someone the right to buy a gun, then that's effectively banning guns for everyone. Unless we have biometric guns or something.

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I actually don't think things like this should affect gun laws in the sense that these events are too infrequent. Granted, 2012 has seen a rash of these things. In the same way, you are falling into the same trap with your anecdotal stories. That is, talking about some granny who held off 3 monstrous black men because she had a gun isn't a good reason to be pro gun either.

OK, let's just stick to the numbers: 100,000 instances of firearms being used in self defense each year. That's not an anecdotal story. I'm not saying it's grandmother and monstrous black men, but it's a lot of people using guns (mostly just showing them) to protect themselves.

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Infrequent events emotive events shouldn't affect policy. Although, frankly, I would understand if it did in this case. If my child was at that school, I would be more anti gun than I am now.

I'll tell you what could have stopped this massacre: another person with a gun. Like a police officer, for instance. Or even a teacher. How many teachers ran away and left their kids behind? They would die for those kids, and maybe a teacher could have saved them if he had the tools. It doesn't make sense to me to be anti-gun. Guns can be protect the innocent and save lives. We should be anti-murder.

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however, what if one could SHOW that having less guns, while being a bad idea in specific circumstances (i.e. I am currently being robbed), makes everyone overall statistically more safe? I am not saying that evidence exists, I am asking what if. If such evidence exists, then in your story of the maimed/raped/murdered, you tell such victims that while we took your ability to defend yourself, you are actually statistically safer. Sorry that bad luck struck you, you were in fact more likely to get shot in the parallel universe where everyone had guns. you don't go out and buy a lottery ticket just because your neighbour wins.

The thing about statistics is that they gloss over details. The population as a whole might be safer, but any particular individual could be much less safe. You really need local, on-the-ground knowledge to decide if owning a gun makes you safer or not, so I think we need to leave that decision to individuals. National legislation is too blunt an instrument.

Sorry for splitting up your paragraph. :)_________________Your argument is invalid.

...What is it within a society which breeds this kind of outburst? it cannot be denied that there is something in the American society which is procreating this.
...

You may be very close to the real crux of the problem...

Ritalin and school rampages seems to go hand-in-hand.

I think you're on to something here. We've got better mental health care now that ever in the past. You only have to go back to the 1950s and they were still basically locking people away and doing horrifying things to them (frontal lobotomies, shock therapy, immersion therapy, etc.). Yet we've never had people gunning down dozens of complete strangers as a sort of "fuck you" to society on their way out. Now we've got ignorant people saying, "lock up all those crazy fuckers!" again, like there's one big unifying, boolean determinant.

Newsflash: almost none of these people have been what most people would call "crazy", and the minor issues most of them have had are pretty characteristic of about half the population. Even the skinhead militia three-toothed redneck who shot Congresswoman Giffords... uh... oh wait... I forgot... he turned out to be a liberal... anyway, even that guy was not determined to be "insane" by the courts.

The most prominent commonality I see here is not mental illness; it's that every one of these people seem to have been socially ostracized, and mostly by their peers (who were, in most cases, adolescents). Also, autism spectrum disorder seems to have been one of the most common reasons for this, and I think we're having a lot more of it than we used to. It's got to be something we're eating or exposing our children to now -- something like a food additive, a chemical in plastics or paints, a medication.

While I hate to say it, violence in entertainment and especially computer gaming, and pseudo-socialization via Internet are probably major factors as well. People are now partially living in artificial reality, and some of them don't like the reality part any more. Adolescent males are becoming conditioned to blowing away large numbers of people, running around in artificial reality killing just about everything they see indiscriminately. I enjoy this as much as anybody, but I think we have to acknowledge that in a developing mind this could have negative consequences.

But let's just ignore all that, rely entirely on media sensationalism as anecdotal evidence, set each other's hair on fire, and allow ourselves to be manipulated into pursuing somebody else's political agenda as the "solution", despite the scientific reality that firearm availability has no correlation with criminal violence (and only a slight correlation with levels of fatality in criminal violence). And, let's run around screaming for "more laws" and "bans", when we're not even effectively enforcing those we have already piled on, layer by layer, over the past 50 years.

"ZOMG the Childrenz!!! Teh Humaanity!! We must have authoritarianism now, because surely that will make all things better!!!"_________________Deja Moo: the feeling that you've heard this bull before

Last edited by Bones McCracker on Tue Dec 18, 2012 4:40 pm; edited 2 times in total